Confessions of a Not It Girl (5 page)

"I hate the word
moist." Did I just say that? Please let me not have just said that.

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"Really?" Josh put his empty bowl on the coffee table and leaned back against the arm of the couch, lacing his fingers behind his head.

For a minute nobody said anything.

"I hate the word
ointment,'"
he said finally.

"Oh God,
ointment's
the worst." I wanted to lean against the arm of the couch, too, but I was still afraid if I moved he would take his foot off my knee.

"How do you feel about
slacks?"
I asked. I settled for leaning against the back of the couch and turning my neck so I could still look at him.

"You mean the thing or the word?"

"The word."

"I'd have to say I'm against it."

"Ditto." We sat there for a minute, smiling at each other. My neck was starting to cramp, but I didn't move. There was no doubt this night was going to land me either in a relationship or a wheelchair.

The phone rang.

"Hang on a sec," said Josh. He walked around the back of the couch and touched the top of my head as he passed. My scalp tingled. I felt like the lady on the T-Gel commercial.

"Hello?...Oh, hey!" His voice sounded different all of a sudden, like he needed to clear his throat. "Um, can you, uh, hang on a second?"

He came back into the living room. I tried to look like I'd been focusing on the TV and not what he was saying.

"Listen," he said, holding his hand over the mouthpiece, "it's for me."

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"Oh, right," I said. "Sure." I reached for the remote control.

"So, uh, I guess I'll see you at Richie's?" He held the phone in both hands up by his shoulder and rocked from one leg to the other.

"Right," I said again. We stayed there holding our respective electronic devices.

"Well, okay, then," he said.

"Okay, then," I repeated.

He swung the receiver around like it was a baseball bat. "See ya."

I angled the remote control toward him. "See ya."

He turned around and put the phone back up to his ear. As he walked away, he said, "Nothing, just hanging out," before closing the basement door behind him.

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CHAPTER FIVE

I woke up on Saturday much later than I usually do. Even before I opened my eyes, I was thinking about Josh. If I concentrated really hard on my knee, I could still feel the spot where his foot had been.

Unfortunately, my room is about the worst place on the planet to analyze a complex romantic entanglement, since it was furnished when I was in third grade and in the midst of a bizarre identification with G.I. Joe. I chose a gray metal army-cot-style bed and a gray metal desk and an olive green rug that looks like AstroTurf. I still can't believe my parents indulged the whole quasi-military theme, what with their being all "No bomb-pops" and everything, but my dad says I threw such a major fit every time he tried to even hint that maybe someday I wouldn't want my room to look like a barracks, they let me do what I wanted.

(I would like to note for the record that the fit I threw last fall, when they wouldn't let me buy a pair of three-hundred-dollar Italian leather boots from Barneys, was not nearly as successful as the fit I apparently threw when my parents tried to convince me to sleep on a canopy bed instead of an aluminum cot. What did my eight-year-old self know that my sixteen-year-old self did not?)

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I couldn't possibly be expected to make sense of the previous night all alone at Fort Miller, so I threw on sweatpants and went downstairs to get a fortifying breakfast before calling Rebecca.

My mom and dad had already finished eating and were sitting in the living room, reading the
Times.

"How was baby-sitting?" my dad asked.

"It was fine. Nothing special."

My mom looked up from the paper. Since it was absolutely crucial that I get into the kitchen, make breakfast, and return to my room without getting into a discussion about (a) Josh or (b) the status of my college application pile, her look was a very bad sign.

My mom and dad both think it's important to express an interest in their children's lives. It's completely annoying. However, I have learned that when you are trying to keep from discussing
one
topic with your parents, the trick is not to say
nothing
because that makes them suspicious. What you need to do is introduce a
different
topic, ideally one so boring they will do whatever is necessary to put an end to the conversation. Normally I have a few of those topics on hand, but thinking about my phone call had left me vulnerable to attack.

I improvised. "We watched
The Little Mermaid.
It's really quite a sophisticated movie when you think about it."

"Oh?" my mom asked, smiling at me.

"Do you remember the scene where you first see Ariel's cave with all the stuff she's taken from the land world?"

"Not really." I saw her eyes dart over to the Metro

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section. My dad wasn't even pretending to pay attention to what I was saying.

"Well, how about that song they sing to try and convince her life's terrible on land? You know that one?" I sang the first line from "Under the Sea."

My mom shook her head. She lifted the paper up a few inches so it half blocked her view of me. "Anyway," she said. "I'm glad you had a nice time."

Mission accomplished.

My dad always gets up early on Saturday mornings and buys delicious breakfast stuff like coffee cake and muffins and brioche even though he complains they're very non-Jewish food items. My dad is obsessed with what is Jewish and what isn't, which is kind of bizarre, considering we never go to temple or anything. He says he's a cultural Jew, and if someone asks what he means, he says he's not a Jew, he's Jew-
ish.
Then he cracks up.

This is only one of ten thousand things he does to irritate me.

I had just finished heating the milk for hot chocolate and was pouring it into my favorite mug, which, ironically, has all these French words and phrases written on it, when the phone rang.

"Are you alone?" It was Rebecca.

The downstairs of our brownstone is basically a big open area that includes the kitchen, the living room, and what I guess you could call the dining area. I leaned over the counter and checked out what my parents were doing; they seemed pretty engrossed in the paper.

"Um, kind of," I said.

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"Okay, get alone and call me back." I took my plate with the coffee cake and my hot chocolate and headed to my room.

"Was that Twiggy?" My dad calls Rebecca Twiggy because according to him she looks just like this model named Twiggy from the 1960s. As you can imagine, there's really nothing better than having a skinny best friend who looks like a famous model when your butt belongs in
The Guinness Book of World Records.

"But of course," I said.

"She should come for dinner soon," said my dad. "I feel like we haven't seen her in ages. How is she?"

I had one foot on the stairs. "I'm about to find out," I said.

"Remember when we were young and things happened to us?" my mom asked my dad. "Vaguely," said my dad. "See ya," I said, going upstairs.

I heard my mom sigh and say, "Youth," right before I shut my door, drowning out the parental nostalgia fest.

"It's me." I was sitting on the floor, leaning against my bed. I took a bite of coffee cake.

"I fooled around with a guy who works with my dad."

I always thought it was an exaggeration when characters in books or movies start choking after they hear a piece of shocking news, but the second she said the word
dad,
I felt a piece of coffee cake go down the wrong way, and I started to gag. She literally had to wait five minutes while I coughed and gasped, trying to catch my breath.

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"Are you, like, hacking up a lung or something?" Rebecca finally said.

"What happened?" I managed to squeak out.

"Well, he's this guy who--"

"No, start with the first second of last night. Start with when you were getting dressed."

Rebecca told me everything from the beginning.

The guests at Rebecca's parents' dinner parties are always lawyers her dad works with and people her mom says are
incredibly
important in the movie industry even though we've never heard of them. She says they're the people who
really
make movies, which I guess means I'd rather have dinner with the people who
don't
really make movies, like Julia Roberts and Josh Hartnett.

Usually Rebecca's parents make a big deal about introducing her to each of the guests as they arrive and being all, "This is our
lovely
daughter," which makes Rebecca want to puke, but last night Rebecca was still getting dressed when people started arriving. By the time she was ready, her parents were each involved in intense conversations and barely saw her come down, so she kind of floated around the room, drinking champagne and avoiding talking to anyone. She ended up standing by the bar checking out the guests, and she kept making eye contact with this youngish guy who was talking to some older guy. The young guy kept looking over at Rebecca, and Rebecca kept looking over at him, and she kind of smiled, and he kind of smiled, and finally he said something to the older guy and came over to where Rebecca was standing.

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"I'd heard the Larkins leave nothing to chance, but I didn't realize they hire people just to stand around looking gorgeous," the young guy said. Rebecca was wearing an extremely short strapless blue dress.

"Is that what I'm doing?" asked Rebecca.

"More or less," he said. Rebecca didn't say anything for a minute, and then he said, "Are you a lawyer? Are you standing there thinking about suing me for sexual harassment?"

"Not exactly," said Rebecca. She'd been trying to decide whether it was fair not to tell this guy she was his host's daughter. "I'm Rebecca."

His name was Brian and he was in his second year at Columbia Law School. He'd been a summer associate at Rebecca's dad's firm, and he was planning on working there full time after he graduated. Rebecca did the math and figured even if he'd gone directly from college to law school, he had to be at least twenty-two.

He asked what she did and she said, "Oh, you don't want to mix business with pleasure, do you?" and so he said, "You're right. Let's just keep this pleasure," and they kept flirting like that until Rebecca's mom announced that it was time to go in for dinner. So right as they were walking into the dining room, Rebecca's dad came over and clapped Brian on the back and put his arm around Rebecca and said, "Glad my daughter's taking such good care of you."

Rebecca said it was like something out of a sitcom. Brian practically spilled his drink on himself. He started calling her dad "sir," and saying things like, "You

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certainly have a very intelligent daughter, sir." Rebecca said nothing.

Rebecca and Brian were seated next to each other at dinner, probably because they were pretty much the only people there under a hundred years old. Brian was now completely ignoring Rebecca even though she kept trying to talk to him, and finally he turned to her and in this semisarcastic voice said, "You don't like to mix business with pleasure?"

So she said, "I'm really sorry about that."

"Were you planning to tell me who you were before or after I made a pass at you?"

"Were you going to make a pass at me?"

The whole time they were having this conversation, they were speaking really quietly and kind of fake smiling at each other so anyone who looked over at them would think they were just talking about something innocent, like the weather. By the time the sorbet came, their fight had taken on this whole flirtatious element, and he was like, "How old are you anyway?" and then, rather than say how old she really is, which is eighteen, Rebecca said, "I'm twelve." So then he said, "So you're in, what, seventh grade?" And she said, "Close, sixth." And he said, "What
are
sixth graders interested in nowadays?" and she said, "Oh, kids today are very advanced," and he said, "In what subjects?" and she said, "You know, math, science, dating." And he said, "Really, what does a sixth grader do on a date?" And she said, "We enjoy martinis at The Madison," which is this incredibly chic bar in Midtown where Rebecca and I used to go sophomore

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year because fancy places never ask you for ID. I guess they figure if you can pay the bill, you're old enough to drink there.

By this time they had both had a lot to drink and were basically ignoring everyone else at the table. I cannot imagine what my mom and dad would do if they had a party at which I spent the entire night alone in conversation with a twenty-two-year-old single man. Last year my dad had a dinner for the students in his graduate seminar, and one of the guys and I talked alone together in the kitchen for about 3.5 seconds. That night my dad came into my room after everyone left and asked if I'd been uncomfortable or anything when the guy and I were talking, and I was like,
Dad, give me a break, we were talking about garbage disposals.
Which we actually were! My dad said he was relieved, and then he gave me this whole speech about how I was becoming a very attractive young woman, and I might not realize it, and blah blah blah blah.

In other words, not only did my parents provide me with the enormous-butt gene, they are clearly determined to ensure that any man who miraculously manages to overlook my freakish figure will never get to be alone with me long enough to ask me out.

So the dinner was winding down, and everyone was going out onto the terrace for coffee and dessert. Brian and Rebecca got up and went outside with all the other guests, and then Rebecca said, "Do you want to see the Empire State Building?" And he said, "Can you really see the Empire State Building from here?" and she said, "Well, we have to go to the other side of the apartment,"

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which is true since they were on the side facing south and the Empire State Building is to the north. She didn't know if he knew what she was planning, but he followed her around the corner, away from all the other guests and up these stairs to the terrace that's off her bedroom.

The Empire State Building was orange, and they tried to decide if that was in honor of Halloween or Thanksgiving. Brian asked if she'd gone trick or treating, and they started joking about how she had gone as Britney Spears with all her little friends. And then she said, "Do you think Britney Spears is sexy?" and he said he hadn't really thought about it, and she said, "Don't you kind of want to kiss her?" and he said something like, "As an attorney I have some concerns about the legality of all this," and then they kissed.

"OH MY GOD!" I said.

"I know," she said.

"Who kissed first?"

She thought about it for a second. "I want to say it was him, but objectively I think even at the last second he was kind of hesitant. I mean, once we started, it was definitely mutual, but I had to push it along."

"How far did you go?"

"We just made out. But my God, Jan, he is
such
a good kisser!"

"Did anyone notice you were gone?"